Up to now I’ve focused mostly on the work end of Maker Faire Detroit, which sorta elides the fact that the point of doing the work is in order to get a chance to run around and check out the fruits of everyone *else’s* labors. When we weren’t wigging out with cigar boxes and guitar strings or spreading the water rocket love, we got to gawk and blather and climb a big huge geodesic dome and eat some pretty darn deliciously overpriced faire-food (Big props to whoever tossed $20 of food tickets into one of our boxes. I don’t know if that was an unlikely wind-blown boon, or if someone surreptitiously helped him/herself to a copy of my book and elected to pay in meal tickets, but finding these in the middle of the first afternoon was a God send of ice-cream sandwiches, lemonades, and bottled waters.) Also, I finally got to ride the conference bike (*this exact conference bike,* although clearly none of those kids is me):
My booth at the Faire was directly adjacent to a table staffed by some students from the Henry Ford Academy, a small high school operated on the Henry Ford Museum campus (which is a pretty rad place to have a school; the older kids are out in some converted box cars in Greenfield Village and the first-year kids are tucked in behind the Dymaxion House in the museum itself). I spent a few days working with the kids last month, and they spent Maker Faire teaching folks to play Go, Tafl, Hex, and how to build cardboard boomerangs (a few pics below, once again courtesy of charming Chris Salzman):
I also got to help my six-year-old solder his *second* MAKE robot blink-eye project (multi-color LED eyes this year; *very* exciting):
Post-Maker Faire relaxation:
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